This is more incompetent hackery from the same old clowns I've come to know and despise. They've been leveling dishonest attacks against the NASA and NOAA global temperature work for *years*. But in all that time they've never learned how to produce their own global-average temperature results (even though it isn't all that hard if you have the requisite math/programming skills).

Are you still denying that the data you use for your graphs has been adjusted?

Are you suggesting that there is something of value in average
temperatures?

Why can't anyone state a theory that would explain how it could even be physically possible for infrared radiation to excite 6 grams of CO2 enough for it to cause a measurable change in the temperature of a kilogram of dry air?

__________________
A big problem with wind and solar is the need to store energy for use when needed. Nature has been solving this problem for millions of years, with coal.

“Agricultural and wetland emissions” from the planet’s tropical areas, not oil and gas activities in the United States, are more than likely responsible for a post-2007 global increase in methane levels, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate.gov.

But regulating or mitigating those methane sources could be difficult or impossible.

“Both of the likely contenders for the recent increase in emissions could be tricky to mitigate,” wrote Climate.gov’s Rebecca Lindsey and Michon Scott. “In developing countries with burgeoning populations, methane control could wind up pitted against the need to expand food production. If natural wetlands are the main source of the increase, control may not even be possible,” the authors wrote.

According to Climate.gov, following a 1999 to 2006 global methane plateau scientists attempted to explain the rise of methane from 2007 to present, first taking a look at fossil fuel production. Instead of finding evidence that supported a fossil fuel-based elevation in methane levels, scientists discovered that a rare isotope, carbon-13, associated with oil and gas production had dropped “significantly” over the same time frame.

“That [isotope] drop casts doubt on one of the first explanations experts considered for the post-2007 rise: an increase in methane emitted from fossil fuels, including “fugitive” methane gas escaping during oil and natural gas drilling,” wrote Lindsey and Scott. “Instead, the chemical fingerprints point toward agricultural and wetland emissions from the tropics,” they continued.

But a regulatory “impasse” on agricultural and wetland mitigation, according to Lindsey and Scott, “might intensify the need to control emissions from other sources, including fossil fuels.”

“If controlling methane emissions remains part of U.S. climate and air quality policy, NOAA research will help policy makers figure out where to start,” the authors continued.

Stefan Schwietzke, a researcher and methane expert at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, a collaborative effort between NOAA and the University of Colorado Boulder, told Climate.gov that attempts to link rising methane levels with the expansion of hydraulic fracturing in the United States over the past decade have produced results that are “counter-intuitive.”

In an email to Climate.gov, Schwietzke explained that his research showed that while methane was rising, the percentage of the methane increase due to fossil fuel production laden with rare, carbon-13 isotopes is falling across all parts of the globe.

“The drop seems to rule out fossil fuel emissions, wildfires, or biomass cook stoves as the reason for the post-2007 methane surge. All those sources of methane, to a greater or lesser extent, are enriched in carbon-13, not depleted,” wrote Lindsey and Scott, saying that, “It’s a counterintuitive finding: methane from fossil fuels is higher than we thought, but it seems to be making up a smaller share of total global emissions.”

With those sources ruled out, Schwietzke wrote, “The decline in the 13-C isotope of methane in the atmosphere indicates that microbial sources must have an increasing share of total methane emissions globally.”

Ed Dlugokencky, a research chemist with NOAA’s Earth System Research Center, says that while the biogenic or microbial thesis is strong, the exact source is unclear, telling Climate.gov, “it seems like methane emissions are increasing most in the tropics and mid-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, and we have some ideas why, but no definite answers.”

According to research performed on behalf of NOAA by the University of Colorado Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, the carbon isotope findings “are consistent with an increase in microbial emissions from both natural wetlands and agricultural sources.” The report lists rice farming and the associated flooding of rice cultivation and livestock emissions as the possible agricultural sources of methane.

“With respect to geography, both sources are plausible. The world’s largest population of ruminant livestock is in India (Northern Hemisphere tropics), and other tropical countries in Africa and South America have large populations as well,” wrote Lindsey and Scott. “Most rice cultivation takes place in the Northern tropics, in India, China, and Southeast Asia. The tropics of both hemispheres are home to the world’s largest wetlands.”

Euan Nisbet, a methane expert at the University of London, disagrees. Natural wetlands – not agricultural sources – are responsible for most of the global methane growth since 2007. Nisbet told Climate.gov that the evidence points away from agricultural sources and towards natural wetlands responding to rainfall increases associated with climate factors like La Niña, which feature wetter climate patterns in the tropics.

Dlugokencky agreed with Nisbet, but told Climate.gov via email that the large drop in carbon-13 related methane emissions called for an explanation that went beyond natural wetland sourcing, and that “there is likely a contribution from agricultural sources, too.”

Electric vehicles are for the affluent "save the world" from the evils of fossil fuels crowd. But many forget the real costs associated with those expensive EVs.

Almost every big motor manufacturer striving to produce millions of electric vehicles buys its cobalt from the impoverished central African state, the Democratic Republic of Congo. It's the world’s biggest producer, with 60% of the planet’s reserves.

I'm sure the purchasers of EVs will no longer buy these vehicles and demand safer conditions and tell car manufacturers to stop using child labor ...

-----------

Child miners aged 4 living a hell on Earth so YOU can drive an electric car

Picking through a mountain of huge rocks with his tiny bare hands, the exhausted little boy makes a pitiful sight.

His name is Dorsen and he is one of an army of children, some just four years old, working in the vast polluted mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where toxic red dust burns their eyes, and they run the risk of skin disease and a deadly lung condition. Here, for a wage of just 8p a day, the children are made to check the rocks for the tell-tale chocolate-brown streaks of cobalt – the prized ingredient essential for the batteries that power electric cars.

And it’s feared that thousands more children could be about to be dragged into this hellish daily existence – after the historic pledge made by Britain to ban the sale of petrol and diesel cars from 2040 and switch to electric vehicles.

Eight-year-old Dorsen is pictured cowering beneath the raised hand of an overseer who warns him not to spill a rock

It heralds a future of clean energy, free from pollution but – though there can be no doubting the good intentions behind Environment Secretary Michael Gove’s announcement last month – such ideals mean nothing for the children condemned to a life of hellish misery in the race to achieve his target.

Dorsen, just eight, is one of 40,000 children working daily in the mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The terrible price they will pay for our clean air is ruined health and a likely early death.

Almost every big motor manufacturer striving to produce millions of electric vehicles buys its cobalt from the impoverished central African state. It is the world’s biggest producer, with 60 per cent of the planet’s reserves.

The cobalt is mined by unregulated labour and transported to Asia where battery manufacturers use it to make their products lighter, longer-lasting and rechargeable.

The planned switch to clean energy vehicles has led to an extraordinary surge in demand. While a smartphone battery uses no more than 10 grams of refined cobalt, an electric car needs 15kg (33lb).

He then staggers beneath the weight of a heavy sack that he must carry to unload 60ft away in pouring rain

Goldman Sachs, the merchant bank, calls cobalt ‘the new gasoline’ but there are no signs of new wealth in the DRC, where the children haul the rocks brought up from tunnels dug by hand.

Adult miners dig up to 600ft below the surface using basic tools, without protective clothing or modern machinery. Sometimes the children are sent down into the narrow makeshift chambers where there is constant danger of collapse.

Cobalt is such a health hazard that it has a respiratory disease named after it – cobalt lung, a form of pneumonia which causes coughing and leads to permanent incapacity and even death.

Even simply eating vegetables grown in local soil can cause vomiting and diarrhoea, thyroid damage and fatal lung diseases, while birds and fish cannot survive in the area.

No one knows quite how many children have died mining cobalt in the Katanga region in the south-east of the country. The UN estimates 80 a year, but many more deaths go unregistered, with the bodies buried in the rubble of collapsed tunnels. Others survive but with chronic diseases which destroy their young lives. Girls as young as ten in the mines are subjected to sexual attacks and many become pregnant.

Dorsen and 11-year-old Richard are pictured. With his mother dead, Dorsen lives with his father in the bush and the two have to work daily in the cobalt mine to earn money for food.

When Sky News investigated the Katanga mines it found Dorsen, working near a little girl called Monica, who was four, on a day of relentless rainfall.

Dorsen was hauling heavy sacks of rocks from the mine surface to a growing stack 60ft away. A full sack was lifted on to Dorsen’s head and he staggered across to the stack. A brutish overseer stood over him, shouting and raising his hand to threaten a beating if he spilt any.

With his mother dead, Dorsen lives with his father in the bush and the two have to work daily in the cobalt mine to earn money for food.

Dorsen’s friend Richard, 11, said that at the end of a working day ‘everything hurts’.

In a country devastated by civil wars in which millions have died, there is no other way for families to survive. Britain’s Department for International Development (DFID) is donating £10.5million between June 2007 and June 2018 towards strengthening revenue transparency and encouraging responsible activity in large and small scale artisanal mining, ‘to benefit the poor of DRC’.

There is little to show for these efforts so far. There is a DRC law forbidding the enslavement of under-age children, but nobody enforces it.

The UN’s International Labour Organisation has described cobalt mining in DRC as ‘one of the worst forms of child labour’ due to the health risks.

Soil samples taken from the mining area by doctors at the University of Lubumbashi, the nearest city, show the region to be among the ten most polluted in the world. Residents near mines in southern DRC had urinary concentrates of cobalt 43 higher than normal. Lead levels were five times higher, cadmium and uranium four times higher.

The worldwide rush to bring millions of electric vehicles on to our roads has handed a big advantage to those giant car-makers which saw this bonanza coming and invested in developing battery-powered vehicles, among them General Motors, Renault-Nissan, Tesla, BMW and Fiat-Chrysler.

Top American Climatologist, an expert in climate modeling, exposes the fallacy that current climate models provide a realistic or reliable prediction of future climate change. In a 1-2-3 step guide to disposing of the global warming debate Dr. Duane Thresher says successful modeling with modern computers is “mathematically impossible.”

Dr Thresher is among the elite of computer climate modelers. He has performed extensive work in climate proxy modeling at the University of Alaska and the Alfred Wegener Institute, Germany. He earned his PhD in Earth & Environmental Sciences (climate modeling/proxies) from Columbia University and at NASA he worked for Dr. James Hansen, the father of global warming, and Dr. Gavin Schmidt.

Dr Thresher offers his step-by-step guide below:

1. It is fundamentally mathematically impossible for climate models to predict climate.

Chaos Theory’s Butterfly Effect is usually described as the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Japan resulting in a hurricane in the Atlantic. This is not artistic hyperbole, this is mathematical reality.

Climate is a quintessential example of this phenomenon.

Unless climate models do the absolutely impossible and account for even a butterfly’s wings flapping, particularly when they are initialized, and then calculate with infinite precision, they can not predict climate.

Climate models are just more complex/chaotic weather models, which have a theoretical maximum predictive ability of just 10 days into the future. Predicting climate decades or even just years into the future is a lie, albeit a useful one for publication and funding.

Qualified climate modelers know all this but almost all won’t publicly admit it out of fear for their careers.

2. Climate proxies are far too inaccurate, unreliable, and sparse to prove anything about past global climate, e.g. that it was colder.

Climate proxies are things like tree rings and ice cores. Given old methods and instruments, even historical climate measurements have to be considered climate proxies.

They are called climate “proxies” because they are substitutes for real climate measurements. Obviously, there are no instruments in these climate proxies so how is it done? The climate measurements have to be inferred from loosely-related characteristics of the proxy, e.g. temperature from tree ring widths. This usually involves primitive modeling or misuse of statistics. It is thus inaccurate and unreliable well beyond what is required for the conclusions drawn.

Climate proxies are very sparse. A single measurement often has to represent thousands of square miles or more, particularly in remote ocean regions, and is usually not representative of that area (e.g. sampled trees are not chosen randomly) or doesn’t even have a knowable bias. A single temperature for the Earth averaged from these measurements is meaningless and absurd.

The reason for using climate proxies is that there is nothing else, which is not a good reason … unless you have to get published or funded.

3. Scientific consensus is not proof of global warming, just publication and funding bias.

Scientific consensus = all published research shows global warming.

Climate model/proxy research that does not show global warming will not get published or funded because of:

Electric vehicles are for the affluent "save the world" from the evils of fossil fuels crowd. But many forget the real costs associated with those expensive EVs.

Almost every big motor manufacturer striving to produce millions of electric vehicles buys its cobalt from the impoverished central African state, the Democratic Republic of Congo. It's the world’s biggest producer, with 60% of the planet’s reserves.

I'm sure the purchasers of EVs will no longer buy these vehicles and demand safer conditions and tell car manufacturers to stop using child labor ...

-----------

Child miners aged 4 living a hell on Earth so YOU can drive an electric car

Picking through a mountain of huge rocks with his tiny bare hands, the exhausted little boy makes a pitiful sight.

His name is Dorsen and he is one of an army of children, some just four years old, working in the vast polluted mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where toxic red dust burns their eyes, and they run the risk of skin disease and a deadly lung condition. Here, for a wage of just 8p a day, the children are made to check the rocks for the tell-tale chocolate-brown streaks of cobalt – the prized ingredient essential for the batteries that power electric cars.

And it’s feared that thousands more children could be about to be dragged into this hellish daily existence – after the historic pledge made by Britain to ban the sale of petrol and diesel cars from 2040 and switch to electric vehicles.

Eight-year-old Dorsen is pictured cowering beneath the raised hand of an overseer who warns him not to spill a rock

It heralds a future of clean energy, free from pollution but – though there can be no doubting the good intentions behind Environment Secretary Michael Gove’s announcement last month – such ideals mean nothing for the children condemned to a life of hellish misery in the race to achieve his target.

Dorsen, just eight, is one of 40,000 children working daily in the mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The terrible price they will pay for our clean air is ruined health and a likely early death.

Almost every big motor manufacturer striving to produce millions of electric vehicles buys its cobalt from the impoverished central African state. It is the world’s biggest producer, with 60 per cent of the planet’s reserves.

The cobalt is mined by unregulated labour and transported to Asia where battery manufacturers use it to make their products lighter, longer-lasting and rechargeable.

The planned switch to clean energy vehicles has led to an extraordinary surge in demand. While a smartphone battery uses no more than 10 grams of refined cobalt, an electric car needs 15kg (33lb).

He then staggers beneath the weight of a heavy sack that he must carry to unload 60ft away in pouring rain

Goldman Sachs, the merchant bank, calls cobalt ‘the new gasoline’ but there are no signs of new wealth in the DRC, where the children haul the rocks brought up from tunnels dug by hand.

Adult miners dig up to 600ft below the surface using basic tools, without protective clothing or modern machinery. Sometimes the children are sent down into the narrow makeshift chambers where there is constant danger of collapse.

Cobalt is such a health hazard that it has a respiratory disease named after it – cobalt lung, a form of pneumonia which causes coughing and leads to permanent incapacity and even death.

Even simply eating vegetables grown in local soil can cause vomiting and diarrhoea, thyroid damage and fatal lung diseases, while birds and fish cannot survive in the area.

No one knows quite how many children have died mining cobalt in the Katanga region in the south-east of the country. The UN estimates 80 a year, but many more deaths go unregistered, with the bodies buried in the rubble of collapsed tunnels. Others survive but with chronic diseases which destroy their young lives. Girls as young as ten in the mines are subjected to sexual attacks and many become pregnant.

Dorsen and 11-year-old Richard are pictured. With his mother dead, Dorsen lives with his father in the bush and the two have to work daily in the cobalt mine to earn money for food.

When Sky News investigated the Katanga mines it found Dorsen, working near a little girl called Monica, who was four, on a day of relentless rainfall.

Dorsen was hauling heavy sacks of rocks from the mine surface to a growing stack 60ft away. A full sack was lifted on to Dorsen’s head and he staggered across to the stack. A brutish overseer stood over him, shouting and raising his hand to threaten a beating if he spilt any.

With his mother dead, Dorsen lives with his father in the bush and the two have to work daily in the cobalt mine to earn money for food.

Dorsen’s friend Richard, 11, said that at the end of a working day ‘everything hurts’.

In a country devastated by civil wars in which millions have died, there is no other way for families to survive. Britain’s Department for International Development (DFID) is donating £10.5million between June 2007 and June 2018 towards strengthening revenue transparency and encouraging responsible activity in large and small scale artisanal mining, ‘to benefit the poor of DRC’.

There is little to show for these efforts so far. There is a DRC law forbidding the enslavement of under-age children, but nobody enforces it.

The UN’s International Labour Organisation has described cobalt mining in DRC as ‘one of the worst forms of child labour’ due to the health risks.

Soil samples taken from the mining area by doctors at the University of Lubumbashi, the nearest city, show the region to be among the ten most polluted in the world. Residents near mines in southern DRC had urinary concentrates of cobalt 43 higher than normal. Lead levels were five times higher, cadmium and uranium four times higher.

The worldwide rush to bring millions of electric vehicles on to our roads has handed a big advantage to those giant car-makers which saw this bonanza coming and invested in developing battery-powered vehicles, among them General Motors, Renault-Nissan, Tesla, BMW and Fiat-Chrysler.

In UN-speak it is called simply “loss and damage.” This is the unfounded idea that people adversely affected by bad weather are “climate victims” and as such they should be compensated by the developed countries that supposedly caused the weather to be bad.

The potential amounts involved are staggering so it is no wonder that the developed countries have steadfastly resisted the idea in UN climate negotiations. In fact loss and damage is often referred to more accurately as liability and compensation.

Yet the concept continues to move forward, because the developing countries love the thought of getting all this money. We are talking about untold trillions of dollars.

__________________
"The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money."- Alexis de Tocqueville, c. 1835

"Climate models play a central role in the attribution of global warming or climate change to human causes. The standard argument takes the following form: "We can get the model to do X, using human causes, but not without them, so human causes must be the cause of X." A little digging reveals that this is actually a circular argument, because the models are set up in such a way that human causes are the only way to get change.

The finding that humans are the cause of global warming and climate change is actually the assumption going in. This is circular reasoning personified, namely conclude what you first assume.

This circularity can be clearly seen in what many consider the most authoritative scientific report on climate change going, although it is actually just the most popular alarmist report. We are talking about the Summary for Policymakers (SPM), of the latest assessment report (AR5), of the heavily politicized UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Their 29 page AR5 SPM is available here.

The "smoking gun" of circularity lies in just two figures, specifically Figures 5 and 6.

First look at Figure 5 on page 14. It is a bit technical, but as the caption says in the first line, these are "the main drivers of climate change" (according to the IPCC that is). There are just eleven of these main drivers, each with a colorful horizontal bar, although some are broken down into components.

The length of each bar represents the IPCC‚s best guess at how much each driver has done since 1750 (and through 2011), which they call a "forcing." So any observed climate changes over that 261 year period must be due to these drivers and this is just what the climate models assume.

In fact the modelers are required to assume it if they want to feed their results into the IPCC assessment. About 100 major climate models are used to do this modeling, in a huge coordinated effort that takes several years to pull off. That effort is coordinated by the US Department of Energy.

The smoking gun begins with the fact that 10 of these 11 drivers are from human causes. The only one that is natural are changes in solar energy input (called "irradiance") and that bar is so small that it basically does not count. In fact, you can barely see it in the figure.

So for all practical purposes, the IPCC assumes that all of the drivers of climate change are human-caused. There are many other drivers that are discussed in the scientific literature but they are simply ignored, here and in the models.

Obviously, if all the drivers of climate change are human caused, then all the observed changes must also be caused by humans. And this is just what we see in Figure 6, on page 18."

"The simplicity of this fallacy is stunning. If you assume that only humans can cause climate change then, of course, it follows that all climate change is caused by humans. But this is just true by assumption, not by science. The reasoning is perfectly circular.

A legitimate assessment of the science would consider the many other drivers that are presently under consideration. Legitimate scientific modeling would explore these drivers, to see what contribution they may be making to the observed climate changes.

Unfortunately neither the IPCC nor the extensive, expensive modeling that is done to support it is legitimate. That the US Department of Energy is at the center of all this politicized non-science is especially bad and needs to change."